Fricke’s First Newport Jazz Festival: 5 Standout Sets
There is – even at this juncture in my game – a first time for everything. On the gloriously sunny morning of August 1st, I walked through a stone tunnel at Fort Adams State Park in Newport, Rhode Island, into my first Newport Jazz Festival. I was a day late. The 2015 edition opened on July 31st with intriguing prospects – the acclaimed trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire; the Chicago saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts; Snarky Puppy, the Texas-born, now Brooklyn-based collective of fusion imps with the industrial-metal name. But I was stuck in a nightmare of afternoon traffic, along with (it turned out) half of the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble. I made up for the delay, though, in bulk: 17 performances across the 1st and 2nd and as much history and modernism as I could hear across Newport’s four stages from midday to dinnertime.
The first Newport Jazz Festival was held in 1954 at the Newport Casino, produced by George Wein, who ran the Boston club Storyville. Wein had been invited by Louis and Elaine Lorillard, a Newport tobacco-fortune couple, to liven up the local summer with some jazz action. A year later, the festival was already making history: Miles Davis – a trumpet star with Charlie Parker in the Forties and arranger Gil Evans on the 1949-50 Birth of the Cool sessions – reentered the ring after a dark sabbatical to kick addiction, illuminating Thelonious Monk‘s magnificent ballad “Round ‘Midnight” with the composer at the piano. Davis was quickly signed to a major deal with Columbia Records; four decades of pioneering music and cast-iron legend followed.
I was at Newport to help celebrate the 60th anniversary of Davis’ festival debut, as a speaker on one of four panels on the Dark Magus hosted by the Grammy-winning jazz critic Ashley Kahn. For an hour on the indoor Storyville Stage, I got to talk about one of my favorite subjects, “Miles and the Electric Guitar,” with author and Downbeat writer Bill Milkowski and guitarist Mike Stern, who I saw with Davis at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall in 1981.
Every other hour was spent in a heavy rotation of hard bop, big-band grandeur, tight, trio swing, serious fun and the seriously out-there. Many sets came with intimate connections: Conrad Herwig’s Latin Jazz Band celebrated the writing of pianist Horace Silver, for whom Herwig played trombone up to Silver’s passing last year; the Philadelphia guitarist Pat Martino honored a primary influence, Wes Montgomery, with a heated trot through the latter’s “Full House,” soloing with brisk invention and bullet-treble tone. And no one I saw settled for mere recital. Dr. John threw striking, darker-blue piano into the swampy menace of “I Walk on Guilded Splinters.” Singer Lisa Fischer, a veteran of the Rolling Stones’ backup chorale and a star of the documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, torched “Fever,” the Little Willie John standard long owned by Peggy Lee, with aerial rapture over the tropicalia-Police-like jamming of her trio, Grand Baton.
Wein, now 89, was a reassuring, presiding spirit: sitting at the side of the Fort Stage, cane across his lap, listening attentively to drummer Jack DeJohnette‘s avant-all-star band Made in Chicago; introducing the pianist and good-natured fireball Jon Batiste, about to know some star time as the musical director of Late Night With Stephen Colbert. And alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, Wein’s junior by one year, was my weekend’s comic star. He closed the Harbor Stage on the final day with an organ trio and what he promised, with a rough, deep chuckle, would be “straight-ahead jazz – no fusion, no Kenny G, no Snoop Doggy Dogg, no 50 Cents [sic] that ain’t worth a quarter.” And he delivered – his own 1958 classic “Blue Walk,” Parker’s “Wee” – between affectionate jabs, like the one aimed at a gentleman seated in a VIP chair near the stage: Earl Powell, the son of a late friend, the great, troubled bebop pianist Bud Powell. “He’s fatter than Bud,” Donaldson cracked, after asking Earl to take a bow, then quickly added, “but he’s all right.”